Just saw a Favreau interview minutes ago. He didn’t say much about the release being pushed back. He did say Garry Shandling plays a porcupine or summat, and a mere month or two ago wanting to re-loop his lines, going as far as sying he would come in and adapt lines to the CGI critter’s mouth movement. He did so, and in Favrau’s words “Really DID improve it, and he killed it!” Disney has much time and money invested, plus as Jungle Book is one of their long-term properties they would certainly appreciate getting a larger cash flow going. Don’t know if this is 4th or 5th or so, but Jungle Book has been a consistent project, but Mowgli never got popular enough to become an amusement park ride.

Tom Cruise’s ‘Edge Of Tomorrow’ Sequel Finds Its Scribes

Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse have been tapped to write the sequel to Tom Cruise and Doug Liman’s sci-fi sleeper hit Edge Of Tomorrow. The original film, also starring a buffed-up Emily Blunt, was a surprise and pleasure for many genre fans with its time-bending narrative and stylish chemistry between its leads. Although a slow opener domestically, it eventually hit $100 million in the U.S. More importantly, it was a bone fide smash internationally, grossing a further $270 million or so to make the case for a sequel pretty compelling.

The original seemed to square up any loose ends pretty efficiently, though, so Shrapnel and Waterhouse will have to be inventive to find a way to get Blunt back in the mix with Cruise. Liman is attached to direct with Erwin Stoff and Tom Lassally producing. Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote the first film, is in talks to board as a producer and is developing the script with the writers.

Shrapnel and Whitehouse are much in-demand. After getting their first proper feature produced this year with the Jesse Owens biopic Race,

Strange that this is getting a sequel. It didn’t make money (according to the kind of maths that we usually do here), it went under most people’s radar to the extent that they changed the name for the DVD, and it was a fully completed story that in no way needs a sequel.

I’m using the Millar math of a movie needing to get at least twice its budget back to break even. By that logic, it just about broke even (depending on how much of the foreign money came from China), with a budget of about 180 million and a world-wide return of 370 million.

Like I said, if even that. At least Mark always goes on about how the budget is usually a bit higher than they’re telling and the studio getting only half the money on China (where EoT apparently did pretty well) returns and so on.

I don’t have any great knowledge about any of this myself, obviously, but at some point of the discussion, I got convinced that the needs-to-make-double-its-budget-back-at-least formula makes sense, so I’ll be sticking with it for now